Apple to Discontinue the Mac Mini?

[bignige]

Pretty much inevitable really. It's been left out in the cold for tooo long.

http://gizmodo.com/5066531/apple-stops-mac-mini-shipments-to-retailers-says-to-expect-no-more

[vanpeebles]

I would of had one to replace my old G4 if the onboard gfx wasn't so crap.

[VR46]

Bit of a bold move if they doen't have a £400 to £500 replacement on the horizon. Feel they need to cater for that end of the scale personally, especially in the current economic climate.

[bignige]

Bit of a bold move if they doen't have a ?400 to ?500 replacement on the horizon. Feel they need to cater for that end of the scale personally, especially in the current economic climate.

I agree, but it's a market they normally ignore.

[CMcK]

Shame if they do kill the mini off as most of my immediate family use them and would happily have another one when the time comes.
A revitalized mini with the new nVidia chipset would be a great wee machine. Certainly more than enough for most peoples needs.

I'd imagine the margins on the laptops are better though.

Maybe the Apple TV and Mac mini ranges are going to be consolidated in some way?

[BaudAttitude]

This would right suck if it's true; hopefully they're only stopping shipments in order to put a new model into production.

The mini is the perfect entertainment center / living room computer.

[Ginger Tosser]

It's been said that Intel stopped (or are stopping) shipments of the old processors, so maybe that's the reason to pull the plug.

I do hope they continue with a mini desktop. I'm wondering if it'll be something to plug straight into the new 24" Cinema display? As that has a magsafe PSU, MDP and USB cable built in. Though the Apple of late will probably remove the Firewire off any need Mini product as Steve thinks it's not important anymore (tell that to my Camcorder and 3 external drives).

BTW, I looked at the 24" Mirror, sorry Cinema display today.......

[ascender]

Steve Jobs said recently that they still aren't interested in competing in certain areas of the market which explains why there's no netbook from them yet despite the rumours. I wonder what the sales figures were like for the Mini as they've never really pushed it which is a shame.

[Ginger Tosser]

Some say it didn't sell. I know a few people with a mini (or 2), so I guess it sold quite well. On Macrumors someone pointed out that the mini is the most popular Mac sold on Amazon (though this could be marketing to shift old/badly selling stock, as the MBA is quite high on the list too (Amazon.com).)

The Mini was intended for switchers, and in my case it suceeded. Though now Microsoft have their own mac switching platform - Vista. The perception that Vista is bad is probably helping apple sell more than the mini ever did.

[abigsmurf]

Mac Mini is way too expensive for what it was. You can build a far superior Mini-ATX AMD system for around £300 (with Blu Ray too) and if you pick your parts well you can make it near silent and give it a DC PSU. But then AMD have some extremely impressive low power, low cost CPUs.

I'd personally like to see them build on the apple TV, make it more of a fully featured media PC rather than a media streamer.

[CMcK]

A £300 Mini-ATX system wouldn't have as good a CPU, wireless kit and would be physically much larger. Not to mention the lack of supplied OS and software.

If Apple stick the new nVidia chipset in the mini and maintain the £399 price point it would be quite good value for money. The Mac mini alikes from Shuttle and Asus cost more than the mini and weren't better specced.

[abigsmurf]

http://www.i4u.com/full-review-392.html

Info the AMD setup being used in most homebuilt HTPCs at the moment. Gets incredibly good performance for the power usage and cost, and the built in gfx card has hardware mpeg4 and .h264 decoding so it decodes 1080p blu ray with ease.

It won't be as small as the mac mini but it'll be a whole lot more featured and much more powerful.

[VR46]

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/rumor-new-mac-m.html

Rumour of a new Mac Mini being announced in January

[fishbowlhead]

Will be interesting to see what they come up with. Apple need a computer under £500 to start drawing more PC users away i think.

Hopefully they push the price point a bit more with the new model as well.

[Lyris]

What Apple need IMO is something inbetween the iMac and the Mac Pro. I want a machine I can add extra PCI cards and internal hard disks too, don't want an all-in-one, but shudder at the cost of the Mac Pro.